In science fiction franchise Star Trek, crew members aboard a spaceship would walk up to a wall panel, speak their order, and watch a meal materialise in seconds. The device, named “replicator”, made food from energy, on demand, bypassing agriculture.
The scene was set in the 24th century. But the future, it seems, has arrived early, as the world attempts to grow meat without raising animals, create seafood without fishing, and produce milk without cattle. The methods vary, from growing animal cells in large bioreactors to fermenting microbes to produce proteins. The science goes by many names—cellular agriculture, precision fermentation, alternative proteins. But the target is the same: to decouple food from land, ocean and animal.
Of the various approaches, cellular agriculture, particularly cultivated or laboratory-grown meat and seafood, has made the most visible, if still limited, leap from the petri dish to the menu. The process involves extracting a small sample of cells from animal tissue and growing them in large steel bioreactors to create a stem-cell line that can divide and multiply. “Just like cells in our body, animal cells are basic building blocks of life,” says Justin Kolbeck, chief executive officer of Wildtype, a cell-cultured seafood company based in San Francisco, US. The company sourced its original material from a fish in 2018. “If you find the right type of stem cells, they can self-renew in a healthy natural way. That means they can turn into the types of cells that become meat, whether it is muscle cell or fat cell or connective tissue... The perfect kind of cell line can keep growing in the right conditions and we do not have to go back to the fish,” he tells Down To Earth (DTE).
These cells are supplied with “growth media” or “growth factors” to convince them that they are inside an animal and not inside a tank, help-ing them multiply. After a few weeks, raw meat is harvested (see “Cultured meat production”).
The idea of cultivated meat took form in Europe, with the first laboratory-grown beef burger patty created by pharmacologist Mark Post at Maastricht University, Netherlands. Post unveiled it on live television in 2013. The first cultivated meat company was founded in the US in 2015 and in 2020, Singapore became the first country to give approval to a California-based start-up called Eat Just to sell cultivated meat in the country. Over the years, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Israel joined the list of nations allowing sale of cultivated meat. As of 2025, there are 142 companies working on the development of cultivated meat and seafood or end products, as per US-based non-profit think tank Good Food Institute (GFI).
In India, six companies are developing chicken and goat-related laboratory-grown meat products, shows GFI data. The Department of Biotechnology under the Union Ministry of Science and Technology is working on the development and promotion of laboratory-grown food, as part of its “Smart Protein” initiatives under...
This article was originally published in the May 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth